


Cinnamon Rolls and Closure

by TheCircleOfLife731



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-28 01:31:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCircleOfLife731/pseuds/TheCircleOfLife731
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the places he feared he might run into someone from his past, a Cinnabon in Omaha just wasn’t one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cinnamon Rolls and Closure

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written post-Felina, pre-Better Call Saul. This update is just me retracing my steps to make the story align with BCS (and to clean up a few awkward lines that bugged me while re-reading it).

Of all the places he feared he might run into someone from his past, a Cinnabon in Omaha just wasn’t one of them.

Jesse and Brock (because there was no way, once he realized that Brock was in the system, that he was going to let him go to foster care) spent three months circling the United States before the money ran out. It had been easy, up until that point – surprisingly so. But Jesse had “skipped out” on probation almost a year ago, by then, and any search party that might have been after him had long-since been moved onto other cases – such as the Heisenberg massacre that Jesse tried to ignore on the news, still unable to believe he’d escaped. But he had, and he’d gotten Brock out of “that place” (as they were calling it), despite his initial worry that he wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near him.

But if working with Heisenberg had taught him anything, it was that there was _always_ a way. You just had to be clever enough to find it.

But Jesse wasn’t a millionaire anymore, and three months of their cross-country road trip later, the money he hadn’t handed to the police was running dangerously low. Although, if he was being honest with himself, he didn’t really regret getting rid of the five million – that money had been tainted in the worst possible way, and he didn’t want those stains anywhere near Brock. Not again.

Besides, Brock was eight-years old and getting restless, and Jesse figured he should probably be enrolled in school or something, right?

So here they were, in a service station off of Interstate 80, on their way to Wyoming – the least populated state in America, according to an almanac Jesse had picked up back in Indiana. Honestly, he’d been carrying a torch for Alaska as their final stop, but in the end, he'd been forced to acknowledge that trying to smuggle both himself, a wanted fugitive, and a little boy who was officially missing, over an international border would be, practically speaking, a pretty insane risk. So, after mournfully scrapping that plan, he'd asked Brock where he would go if he could pick anywhere, but Brock had only responded with “to the mountains”, so he’d turned the car toward the Rockies. He figured they could settle down in some small mountain town there, where people were less likely to ask for paperwork for every little thing. Or so he hoped. And if they needed to leave the country, weren’t they less likely to run into problems with security in a smaller airport? He didn’t know much about all that, but he knew he had to figure it out – he had to think like Heisenberg now.

He wondered when he had started thinking of his old teacher as Heisenberg. Somehow, it was more bearable than thinking of Mr. White.

But whether it was smart or not, whether it would work or not, it was a plan, at least, and a plan was better than the aimless wandering they’d been doing so far. So when Brock headed to the bathroom, Jesse wasn’t worried, for once. Everything seemed fine. Like it was all finally going to work out.

Then he stopped at the damn Cinnabon.

Jesse Pinkman and Saul Goodman stared at each other over the counter in a frozen kind of horror. Saul was working the cash register, and wearing an apron, and Jesse could not believe – _could not believe_ – that this was happening here, of all places, of all the times they could have been caught, it was in a Cinnabon in Nebraska?! But then his brain caught up, and he took in Saul’s equally fearful expression, and the nametag that read “Gene.”

“Uh, hi, Gene,” he forced himself to say, as close to nonchalant as he could get.

“Hello, sir,” Gene numbly replied. “What can I get for you?”

“Just two… regular… um…”

“Coming right up!” he exclaimed, practically diving away to fill the order.

The whole thing was too freakin’ surreal. Jesse wondered what the odds of this were – wondered fleetingly if Heisenberg could’ve actually calculated them. He remembered him mentioning, once, that he’d tried to calculate the odds of meeting Jane’s dad in a bar on the night she’d died–

No, that line of thought was forbidden. He was alarmed by how quickly it had resurfaced, just by seeing a face from the past.

Gene rang him up at the counter, his hands shaking a bit when he took Jesse’s money. They avoided eye contact. Finally, as his former lawyer handed him his cinnamon rolls and change, Jesse spoke.

“Sorry for trying to kill you,” he whispered, almost inaudibly. There was no one in line behind him, and this gave him courage. “And for, y'know, beating the crap out of you. And pointing a gun in your face. And, uh, stealing your car. That was my bad. I mean - I know you didn't... so yeah.”

Gene looked horrified for a moment, but then, incredibly, his face softened - marginally, but enough - and his lip even began to twitch upward a bit, as though he were on the verge of transforming back into Saul Goodman, face bright and words flying fast, tearing into Jesse with that merciless, mocking, but somehow good-natured laugh. But that couldn't happen here; their past was past, and that song and dance didn't belong to a man named Gene. Instead, this stranger said, very quietly, “I’m sorry too… for everything, kid.”

Jesse blinked, then shook his head as Brock ran over to them. “Not the kid anymore,” he countered, feeling childish as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but having felt, at that moment, that they needed to be said.

“No,” Gene agreed, looking at Brock in some surprise. “I guess you’re not.”

Brock recognized him – of course he did – but other than the slight widening of his eyes, he was too shy and too weary to give any other sign. Jesse wondered if anything could surprise Brock anymore.

Jesse nodded, just a bit, and threw his change into the tip jar. There was little else to be said.

And as he and Brock crossed into Wyoming, trying to pick their new names and Jesse fighting hard to convince Brock of the merits of Ronaldo, for the first time, he felt something like closure.


End file.
